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it. But now he wanted to be just like the rest of them. He wanted to be married. Kate couldn’t figure out why.
    Late that night, she stood beside her cousin, looking out over the mountains in the distance.
    “You’re being a trouper,” Jeff said. “Even though I know you don’t get it.”
    Other than Dan, he was the one person she had always talked to about these things, the only one who ever seemed to understand why she never wanted to be married. And, though she knew it wasn’t about her, the whole thing felt like a small betrayal.
    “There are so many countries in the world where people don’t even care about marriage anymore,” she said.
    “But not America,” he said.
    “No. Not America.”
    “Where’d you come from, anyway?”
    “I don’t know. I think May must have depleted our mother’s womb of some nutrient that causes a child to be normal.”
    “That sounds about right. What was it Fran Lebowitz said?” Jeffrey asked. “Why do gay people want to get married and be in the military, which are the two worst things about being straight? Something like that. We just want our relationship to be accepted and acknowledged as much as anyone else’s. It might sound dumb, but it’s really that simple. We want to be the same.”
    “That’s one of the reasons I
don’t
want to be married,” she said. “Because I don’t feel that what I have with Dan is the same as what Mayand Josh have, or any of our friends, or, God forbid, my parents. I don’t think any two relationships are really the same, so why rubber-stamp them all like that?”
    “That’s not what I mean when I say the same,” he said. “I mean equal.”
    “I know.”
    “In my heart we’ve always been married. But now we’ll have the same basic rights as straight people. Insurance and inheritance and all that. You know we want to adopt someday. I’ve been afraid forever that if something happened to Toby and we weren’t married, his crazy parents would try to take the kid away from me.”
    She put an arm around him, and as much as she could, Kate understood.
    Since then, she had been a good sport. A few weeks later, the guys came upstate again one weekend. She prepared a feast; pumpkin bread and blueberry muffins, short ribs and potatoes au gratin, green beans and apple crisp, and buckets of red wine. For two days, they sat around her kitchen table, stacked high with wedding magazines and their laptops, and planned. Dan called it the War Room.
    In the mix of magazines was a new publication called
Wedding Pride
. If Kate had assumed it would be harder for the wedding industry to monetize marriages between two men, she was mistaken: here were the ads for tooth whitening, Botox, laser eye surgery, because God forbid you should wear glasses to your wedding. Jeff got annoyed by an article entitled “My Big Fat Gay Honeymoon: Ten Gay-Friendly Locales Around the Globe.”
    “Please,” he said. “I’ll have my honeymoon where I damn well want to.”
    Toby glanced at the page. “It’s a practical concern,” he said. “There are a lot of places we wouldn’t feel comfortable. Places where people would be hostile. You’re an East Coaster, you have no idea.”
    “Hey! I studied abroad in Madrid,” Jeff said, which prompted an eye roll from his fiancé.
    Jeff held a book in his lap and made notes.
    “What is that?” Kate asked after a while.
    “It’s my bride book,” he said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Emily Post’s Wedding Planner.”
    She looked at Toby, who just shrugged.
    “Give me that,” she said. She flipped through the pastel pages, and with each new task her anxiety level doubled: There were flowers to think about, and a wedding website, a band for the reception and music for theceremony, place cards, forks and linens. Invitations and favor?” Frances asked.94 a new l fs for all your guests. Something called
tablescapes
.
    “This thing makes me feel like I’m going to have a panic attack, and it’s not even my